Two hundred and eighty-one words, grouped the way we teach them: greetings and pronouns first, then numbers and time, then the home, food, places. Not an alphabetical list but the order in which you need them.
There is no official list: since 2010 the JLPT has published no vocabulary lists. This is the selection of our own N5 course, built on the real frequency of the headwords rather than on somebody else's list.
Where this selection comes from
The headwords are attested against JMdict, the open reference dictionary, with its frequency markers; the kanji scope follows the Japanese ministry's Jōyō list. The level classification and thematic order are ours, because no official JLPT list has existed for fifteen years — anyone showing you one is showing a reconstruction, ours included, with the difference that here it says so.
Why theme beats alphabetical order
Words are remembered in groups: 朝, 昼 and 晩 learned together hold each other up; scattered through an alphabetical list they don't. That is why the list is split the way the lessons are rather than the way a dictionary is — and why the printable PDF keeps exactly the same blocks.
Two hundred words don't make a conversation
With this vocabulary you can order in a restaurant, ask for directions, introduce yourself and follow simple questions. What it doesn't give you is fluency: that takes particles, verbs and listening practice, which are different exercises from learning words.
The problem isn't learning them, it's not losing them
Two hundred and eighty-one words can be read in an afternoon and forgotten in a week. This is where a list, however well made, stops being enough: without a system that brings them back just before they slip, the time spent reading them is time lost.
The 281 words, by theme
Under each word is its kana reading, except where the word is already written in kana. The meaning is the one we use in the lessons, not a machine translation.
Yukigo teaches these same words inside sentences, with audio, handwriting and spaced repetition that brings each one back exactly when it is about to go. Free and ad-free.
The most cited estimates say 700–800 words. This list gathers 281, the thematic core of our path: the rest comes from words formed with the kanji, from numbers, and from expressions you learn inside the grammar.
No. Since 2010 the JLPT publishes no vocabulary lists, so every list in circulation is a reconstruction. We start from real frequency attested against JMdict, and we say so plainly.
At ten words a day, under a month to see them all once. But seeing isn't knowing: the real time goes into review, which is why spreading them out beats cramming.
At N5 many are normally written in kana, and that is fine. For the ones with a common-use kanji it pays to learn both together, word and character, rather than the character on its own.
Another 204 words, taking the total to 485. What changes most is the kind: fewer concrete objects, more verbs, adjectives and words describing situations.
Yukigo